Monday, December 21, 2015

I took my three year old to his first movie. We went to see the new Peanuts. After buying the tickets (a matinee, mind you) and one small popcorn and one small soda pop, I had spent thirty dollars.

Thirty dollars.

Really?

How does a wonderful rite of passage get sullied so easily?

We had fun, so that's not the issue. My son had no idea about costs, and enjoyed himself as he should have.

I understand that the MPAA wants us to believe they don't make enough money to "cover their costs" of making a movie, and that attendance in theaters is probably down due to Netflix, Redbox, etc.

But seriously, thirty dollars?

This has the unintended effect of making me less interested in attending more movies, which perhaps the MPAA hasn't given enough thought to... a habit they exhibit with some consistency, as copyright troll law firms are notorious for gleaning IP addresses and threatening the general populace.

Their ugly sister, the RIAA, also sends expensive law firms after eleven year old girls for "piracy," among other things.

These activities don't exactly make me sympathetic to their concerns.

Well done, greedy jerks! Good job attending to your profit margin at the excessive expense of the people who provide your revenue.

Friday, December 4, 2015

I realized soon after posting the short essay yesterday that some might wonder just what was logically impaired in the sentence I quoted from Hofstadter/Dennett. I will take a moment and explain it, in case the shortsighted authors' blunder does not appear obvious enough.

The sentence was:

"How could the science that had worked so well for so many things turn out to be so wrong?"

In context, it was prompted by their thoughts regarding whether or not extrasensory perception could be proven to exist.

The sentence presents a statement and a question. Hofstadter/Dennett are referring to "science" as a collective entity, the sum of all scientific disciplines:

1) ...science [has] worked so well for so many things...

2) How could [that same science] turn out to be so wrong?

The statement (1) stands on its own, and is quite sound.

The question (2) is the problem, for the following reasons:

1) If science is correct about X, Y, and Z, it is not unreasonable to imagine that it could possibly be incorrect about A.

2) Their sentence as a whole implies that since science has produced many positive results, it's incredible to think that it could be wrong about something... even if that something happens to be outside of science's purview.

3) Science is a collection of different disciplines, all allegedly guided by the scientific method to draw their conclusions. To the best of my knowledge, all scientists in the world have not signed off on some consensus to validate nor invalidate extrasensory perception.

4) A scientist or scientists could potentially pursue extrasensory perception with the scientific method if they desired. But their results, for or against, are the findings of one or more studies, and are not the embodiment of all science.

5) Therefore science as a whole has absolutely nothing to say about the subject the authors are pondering, namely the possible validity of extrasensory perception.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

While culling my books, I came across various efforts from Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. Having lost interest in wasting time on their reductionist polemic, I placed them in the 'garage sale' pile. That pile, incidentally, being another embarrassing level down from the $1 clearance section of Half Price Books.

I still flipped through them, as with all my books, to see if there was anything that would make them worthy of retention. In the process, I came across a curious demonstration of intellectual hubris in a book called "The Mind's I" co-authored by Hofstadter and Dennett.

Chapter four is an abridged reproduction of Alan Turing's prescient 1950 paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," with Hofstadter's and Dennett's "Reflections" afterward.

First of all, Alan Turing was an authentic genius who left most "bright" persons murmuring in his wake. His genius was not a collection of misguided ruminations; it actually produced innovative and useful results, such as the electromechanical machine that was used to crack the German Enigma code in World War II.

Hofstadter and Dennett are a couple of intelligent guys who spout some interesting philosophy if you prefer to think we're all an accident, but nothing of any practical use has come from their "reflections on self and soul."

While correctly observing that Turing's article was "remarkable and lucid," these two stubborn bumblers couldn't resist their obsession with materialism, and felt compelled to comment on Turing's argument from extrasensory perception.

Not content to simply disagree, they implied that Turing could possibly have been sharing an inside joke with his academic friends, as of course no reasonable intellectual could possibly consider anything real which doesn't yield to the five senses.

They go on to observe that if the common constituents of extrasensory perception were found to actually exist, the result would not be a mere alteration to the laws of physics, but would instead require a major modification to "our" scientific world view.

These self-imagined Einsteins then generated this sentence:

"How could the science that had worked so well for so many things turn out to be so wrong?"

The shoddy logic in their reasoning is evident; they are masters of exclusionary thinking, like the rest of the wishful babblers who believe that the entity known as God will one day become a handy traditional joke around future offices populated by sentient robots.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Due to a fundamental change in my daily routine, I've been more productive lately than I've been in a long time, as watching my three year old during the day and working at night has a suppressing effect on my desire to produce anything.

Since the beginning of summer this year, I've been doing things long relegated to the 'someday' to-do list, including summer-long yard projects, programming a game I hope to release at some point, applying final touches to a book I finished in 2007 (in order to upload it to Amazon), and more recently, finally getting back on the music production bandwagon with two friends in other states.

In the last few weeks, I've also been implementing a long-delayed culling of my immense book collection, which before culling, occupied two full walls of my family room.

I can't believe how many books I'm discarding. For example, on one entire shelf of mind/consciousness volumes, I'm keeping one book. The same thing happened on one of the theoretical physics shelves.

I've clearly turned a corner in my life. I'd been clinging to the idea since I was about 30 that someday I would integrate all these books and formulate a synthesis or new theory no one had thought of, thus making me 'famous.' Ha! Indeed.

The truth of the matter isn't that I gave up on some noble quest; the truth is I finally acknowledged how unimportant e=mc2 and theoretical speculation are to the human experience.

Could the human race have existed and thrived without nuclear bombs and power plants, ultra-precise clocks, 'uncrackable' codes, GPS, quantum computers (which are specialized and have no bearing on what most people use computers for), microscopes for atoms, biological compasses, and endless speculations about how the mind works with a questionable agenda of applied artificial intelligence?

I think I can say yes to that without acquiring Luddite status. Reverse engineering our reality is nothing more than an exercise in pride and vanity, and irrelevant to our aspirations of making the best of the one life we all have.